TRANSCRIPT
Can we resolve all of our traumas? Can we resolve all of the horrible things that happened to us, starting from when we were babies, maybe from when we were even in the womb? Is it really possible? My intuition tells me that it is possible. The reason that I think that it is possible, for starters, is that I know that we can heal some of our traumas because I’ve done it. I’ve healed some of mine, and I’ve seen a lot of other people out there resolve some of their traumas. So my thought is that if we can resolve some, we can do the whole job. We can resolve everything.
Now, what’s stopping me from resolving all of my traumas? What’s stopping other people? One thing I’ve seen that makes it hard for people to resolve traumas is the environment that they live in. For instance, when people come to therapy and they’re trying to resolve their traumas, and they find therapy a safe and healing place to talk about what happened to them, to feel their feelings, and they can feel like they’re making a lot of progress, yet they go back into the rest of their lives. Perhaps they are living with a partner or living with a family who is not at all supportive of them doing healing work. Perhaps they go to a job where they don’t feel safe to be themselves at all, and they actually have to shut down to be able to survive in that job. Or they’re in a school environment where there’s no safety to feel their feelings. Their teachers and their fellow students and the whole environment itself doesn’t allow them to do that.
Or perhaps the psychology of the people around them don’t even believe in healing at all, don’t believe in feeling your feelings. Instead, the psychology of the world around them says shut down, be tough, be strong, move past it, block out those feelings, let go of your anger, forgive everyone. That’s a big one that I think goes really against working through trauma: forgive, forgive, forgive, dissociate from your feelings.
Now, the problem is what I see is when people live in an environment where people work in an environment where people’s personal lives are surrounded by an environment that is actually not nurturing of their healing process, that’s not nurturing of them working through their traumas, it becomes inordinately harder for them to actually do the job of working through their traumas. We are social beings. We need other people in our lives to support us, to love us, to care about us, to respect our process. And when we live in a social environment that’s not supportive of healing our traumas, maybe we even go to a therapist who’s not very supportive of us healing our traumas. And I’ve done that before. I’ve gone to therapists that are not supportive of my healing process. It becomes much, much harder to do the work of healing our traumas.
Now, for me in my life experience, I don’t know why it was. I don’t know why I ended up being the person I am, but I had a lot of energy and dedication and personal force toward healing my traumas, toward respecting my growth process, for making sense of my painful history, to make sense of the ugly things that happened to me, to get away from the bad people who harmed me. I fought really hard to get as far as I have gotten in my life. My healing, my traumas have been a lot of struggle and hard work. I’ve actually worked really hard to try to create an environment around myself, a safety, to find work that allows me to heal better, to find friends who allow me to heal better. Yet I know that my environment, my healing environment, is something of a bubble because I know how easy it is for me to step outside of the bubble.
I can very easily enter the world where when I talk about healing, when I talk about my healing process, when I talk about feeling my feelings, when I talk about my philosophy about healing trauma, I know how many people actually don’t support it. And I know I live in a greater context of a culture, of a society, of a country, of a world that doesn’t support healing trauma. And it’s very, very hard to do. And I think for many people, it’s hard to even create a micro environment for themselves. It’s hard to create a bubble for themselves in which they can do very much healing of trauma at all.
But to get back to the question of what would it take, what’s the reality of really being able to heal all of our traumas? I think what would happen for me to be able to heal all of my traumas, if I think my safe place that allows me to do my healing, my bubble as it were, would have to be a lot, lot bigger. I imagine what would it be like if I was living in a world where every single person I ran into was also trying to heal their traumas. I’ve talked about this before. What would happen if I went out to the subway in New York City and everybody was healing their traumas?
When I talked about this with a stranger sitting next to me on the subway, and they said, “Yeah, I’m working through some really awful traumas I went through in my childhood, you know, and in my family of origin from when I was five, six years old. It’s really tough.” And I’d say, “I actually really relate to that,” and we could bond over it. And it wasn’t like, “Oh my god, I found someone who is actually able to talk about trauma,” but everybody was talking about this. What I have experienced is when people start working through their traumas, they want to talk about this. They want to talk about this a lot because it becomes something that for many people is the most important thing in their lives.
Because for me and for a lot of other people I’ve seen, healing traumas is my personal salvation. It gives me my purpose in life. It gives my life more value. It makes me like myself more. It makes me have more empathy for the person who I used to be, the person who I am now, the problems that I have. It puts my problems in a context. It allows me to have compassion for myself, and by extension, it allows me to have compassion for other people. It makes it a lot easier for me to make friends, to see the good in other people, to have hope for other people’s growth processes. But often, yeah, I feel pretty alone in my healing process. I don’t see a lot of people around me doing this. I feel in many ways I’m part of a very small minority.
But I imagine what if I wasn’t part of this very small minority? What if I was a majority? I think what would happen if I was part of a majority, if most people or everybody was doing this, if this became the conscious dedication of our world? I think everybody’s healing process would become a lot easier. People would be so much safer to feel their feelings, to get to know their history.
I think now because we live in an environment, a world culture, all these different cultures where healing is not allowed, it’s actually considered a bad thing. Often, feeling our feelings can often be a dangerous thing. It can get us rejected. People don’t do it. It’s too difficult. But I imagine if everybody was doing it, wow, how much easier it would be to have friends, lots of allies everywhere, to have support. Imagine if I could turn on the television and this was a subject. This isn’t a subject when I turn on the television almost ever. Instead, when I turn on the television, what do I see? I see violence. I see people causing trauma towards one another. I hear about terrible crimes. What are all these crimes that I hear about on the news? These are people acting out their traumas. They’re replicating the horrible things that were done to them onto other people and causing other people to be traumatized and causing these other people who are traumatized often to act out their traumas on more people.
We live in a world in many ways that’s becoming increasingly traumatized. Now I imagine what if that were reversed? What if we were living in a world that people really could feel was getting healthier, that could really feel on a large scale was getting more and more hopeful?
I think people would be so much more motivated to put energy in, because their energy that they would put in would be a really good investment.
I think for many people, unconsciously, they realized, wait a second, if I put energy into feeling my feelings and remembering what horrible things that happened to me in my life, it’s gonna make my life worse.
A lot of people say that. I think a lot of people don’t want to do deep therapy. They don’t want to do deep therapy because of that. Their feelings come up, they feel more alienated, they feel more depressed, they feel more sad, they can’t function as well. It’s like, why do it?
Well, maybe now the people who are actually working really hard to heal their traumas are like the Vanguard, are the cutting edge of society’s hopeful people.
But imagine if a tipping point was reached. Let’s say the people who are really working hard to heal their traumas are one-tenth of one percent of the people in the world, or one-hundredth of a percent of the people in the world.
Well, imagine if we were five percent of the people, or ten percent of the people, or thirty percent of the people. I think it would be easier to do this work.
I think it would be easier to go back into our deeper childhoods. I think we could see our healing processes reflected in what other people did all around us all the time.
I think it would be easier for us to remember what happened to us. I think it would be easier for people to reclaim their feelings.
And then I think it would become much more than just intuition for me, that we could do the whole job, heal the whole shebang of all that happened to us.
I think it would start to become obvious to people that, yeah, we could all do this. We could all heal.
And then what I think would happen is we would all become a new species.
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